Rash of Russiain teen suicides not unusual

RUSSIA

Washington Post

Published
4:00 am PST, Thursday, March 8, 2012

Lobnya, Russia --

Russia is hard on its children, and Yelizaveta Petsylya and Anastasia Korolyova finally decided, at the age of 14, to do what thousands of other Russian teenagers have done. There was one way to assert control over their lives, and that was to end them.

Russia has the third-highest teenage suicide rate in the world, just behind its neighbors Belarus and Kazakhstan and more than three times that of the United States. On an average day, about five Russians under age 20 take their own lives.

Psychiatrists and health experts here know why it happens. Alcohol abuse, domestic violence and rigid parenting all play a role. Too many parents expect unquestioning obedience. Social conformity is strictly enforced, especially outside the big cities. Isolation is a huge problem in such a large country. There's rarely anywhere to turn for help, but even if there were, families would be unlikely to admit their failings to outsiders.

Suicide is an attempt to seek relief from all that by taking charge. The two teens, called Liza and Nastya by their families and friends, left letters behind: They wanted to wear white dresses and be buried in white coffins, and their wishes were honored.

In the Soviet era, suicide was considered an affront to the state, the failure of a citizen to fulfill his responsibility. Psychiatry was more often associated with punishment than with therapy, and that left a stigma and mistrust of mental health care that persists. And, while championing the collective, the Soviets destroyed the old Russian sense of community. Bullying is everywhere. And so is loneliness.

"At home, you order, you enforce, you punish your kids instead of trying to understand them," said Anatoly Severny, one of Russia's very few child psychiatrists. "Schools use what I call repressive pedagogics. Kids are forced to do everything."

When Liza and Nastya leaped on Feb. 7 from the roof of a high-rise on the north side of Lobnya, a midsize suburb about 40 minutes by train from Moscow, the media took notice because UNICEF had just released a report on teenage suicide in Russia. Almost every day since then, there have been more reports of adolescents killing themselves - in Barnaul and Krasnoyarsk and Moscow and Yakutsk and Rostov-on-Don.

It seems like an epidemic, but in fact it's the usual state of affairs.

"Nobody teaches teachers how to pick up on these cases," Severny said. An attempt to introduce mental health services at schools has been "absolutely ineffective," he said.

"The level of trust among students toward their schools, their teachers, even psychologists in schools, is very low," said Alla Ivanova, a researcher at the Ministry of Health. "The culture is, you don't discuss your problems with anybody."